Rolling coal: Biden’s newest climate rule takes an aggressive swing at power plants

President Joe Biden’s administration issued rules Thursday ordering power companies to cut pollution from coal plants — a major plank in his efforts to fight climate change, amid complaints from progressive green voters who say he’s done too little to curb fossil fuels.

The rules from the Environmental Protection Agency build on the administration’s long list of climate-fighting policies and are certain to draw opposition from the coal industry and Republicans. But the bigger challenge for Biden will hinge on whether they will appease progressive voters worried about climate change without losing centrist Democrats wary of the costs of his transition to clean energy.

Biden is likely to need a strong turnout among young, climate-focused voters to beat former President Donald Trump in the November election, but many of the progressives who helped send him to the White House in 2020 have expressed frustration at his approval of several high-profile oil and gas projects. Many of those young activists have also voiced anger at the president’s handling of the war in Gaza, an issue boiling over this week with escalating protests on some college campuses.

“Biden can’t create green jobs on Monday, on Tuesday approve a big oil export project, and then expect young people to turn out in the numbers that he needs us to,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, spokesperson for the youth climate group Sunrise Movement.

Other, more mainstream environmental groups have praised Biden’s climate achievements, despite having challenged his approvals of fossil fuel developments including the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska, the Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline and a massive new oil export terminal in Texas.

“Everything about the possibility of Trump being reelected is risk, risk, risk in every direction,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president for government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters, which has endorsed Biden. “There’s no doubt that it would be devastating for the climate progress that we so desperately need and that we finally started to make under President Biden’s tremendous leadership.”

The final rules EPA unveiled on Thursday will require the nation’s dwindling fleet of about 200 coal-fired power plants to install carbon capture technology if they plan to continue operating past 2039. But it makes a few concessions to ease the transition for power companies — for example, as POLITICO’s E&E News first reported Wednesday, operators of coal plants would have until 2032 to install carbon capture, two years later than the agency had originally proposed.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan is expected to formally announce the rules at Howard University on Thursday morning.

West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, the top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, lambasted the rule as “the illegal Clean Power Plan 2.0,” referring to a major Obama-era regulation that the Supreme Court struck down two years ago.

“Electricity demand is set to skyrocket thanks in part to the EPA’s own electric vehicles mandate, and unfortunately, Americans are already paying higher utility bills under President Biden,” Capito said in a statement. “Despite all this, the administration has chosen to press ahead with its unrealistic climate agenda that threatens access to affordable, reliable energy for households and employers across the country.”

A suite of rules

The EPA’s package of regulations also includes more stringent requirements on mercury emissions from burning coal, as well as reductions in the pollutants discharged through coal plants’ wastewater. And the agency is seeking additional cleanups of coal ash, a toxic waste byproduct of burning coal that is typically stored in ponds or buried.

Completing those four rules together is intended to give the power sector a broad view of the regulatory costs it will face from continuing to burn coal. Already, coal’s share of U.S. electricity production has plummeted during the past two decades, to about 16 percent from more than half.

Finishing the rules now could also protect the regulations from being rolled back by Congress next year if Republicans capture both Capitol Hill and the White House. Under the 1996 Congressional Review Act, any regulation approved after late May could be vulnerable to a legislative repeal.

“EPA was smart in finalizing a suite of rules together,” Gina McCarthy, Biden’s former climate adviser and an EPA administrator in the Obama administration, said in a statement. “They’re providing a big step forward and the certainty industry needs to to provide reliable, affordable clean energy to all Americans.”

That transition to clean energy got a historic boost under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which devotes hundreds of billions of dollars in tax incentives and loans to installing wind, solar and other types of carbon-free electricity, as well as building out the manufacturing capacity to speed the rollout of electric vehicles.

The administration has paired those green stimulus carrots with some regulatory sticks — such as EPA regulations targeting greenhouse gas pollution from vehicles and the oil and gas sector, as well as tighter energy efficiency standards for appliances from the Energy Department.

But those achievements haven’t always broken through with voters, particularly young people.

A recent Harvard poll shows Biden with a narrower lead over Trump among people ages 18 to 29 than he held at this point in the 2020 campaign — driven by widespread disapproval over his support for Israel in its conflict with Hamas.

Elise Joshi, executive director of the youth-led environmental group Gen-Z for Change, said young voters see issues like Palestine and climate change as connected and noted that the Gaza conflict is raising environmental and energy concerns as well.

“As a climate passionate young person, it’s my responsibility to stand for Palestinian liberation. If Biden cares about us showing up for him in November, he can’t give us a cookie regarding one issue and treat us with hostility on another,” she wrote in a text message.

Heather Hargreaves, deputy executive director of campaigns with Climate Power, an advocacy group with an $80 million war chest to help reelect Biden, said connecting with young voters is far more complicated than pouring money into TV ads.

Climate Power works with social media influencers, for example, to reach young people, who overwhelmingly back the types of policies Biden has pursued, including regulations. Polling the group conducted last month with research firm Data for Progress showed that 72 percent of 18- to 34-year-old voters either strongly or somewhat supported developing rules to reduce pollution from coal- and gas-fired power plants.

The rule issued Thursday will not outright stop burning fossil fuels for electricity. Instead, it will require power plants to use carbon capture technology to prevent most of the greenhouse gas pollution from reaching the atmosphere. But critics say that technology is too expensive and has never been shown to work on a large scale — and many environmentalists and communities located near power plants oppose it.

And EPA withdrew parts of an earlier version of the rule that would have applied similar requirements to existing natural gas plants, the nation’s number one power source. Instead, the agency opted to pursue a second rulemaking that will take until at least 2025. That timing would allow Trump to reverse course on the gas regulations if he wins the White House.

Adding to Biden’s complications, even some Democratic lawmakers had urged the administration to go slow on the power plant rules, citing worries about their impact on how they will affect electricity prices and reliability. Those include Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, the top Democrat on the House energy-water appropriations subcommittee, who led a recent letter to EPA Administrator Regan, and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who urged the agency last year to consult with industry and labor before finishing the rule.

The rules are likely all to be challenged in court, with the biggest bulls-eye focusing on the carbon capture requirement. Critics and industry experts have long argued that the technology isn’t ready, is too expensive and would create infrastructure demands that could take years to resolve. If that part of the rule is struck down, it’s unclear what technology may be left that could significantly curb carbon emissions from coal plants.

Young, and jaded

Young people are increasingly distrustful that the government can adequately address climate change, said Benji Backer, chair of the American Conservation Coalition, an organization of young conservative environmental advocates. For Biden, that manifests in disapproval from progressives “with the loudest microphone” who believe he is too reluctant to block fossil fuels, he said.

Satisfying those voices will not be easy for Biden without potentially turning off other people, Backer said.

“I do think that the far left that he’s trying to capitulate to is out of step with young people,” Backer said. “Former President Trump has the same problem. He’s trying to capitulate to the far right, which doesn’t think climate change is real, which also turns off young people. And I think that it’s a perfect example of how the party system is not working for young people.”

Recent polling backs up that disillusionment with Biden and Trump. Of the 1,500 18- to 35-year-old likely voters polled by NextGen America across battleground states Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia, 20 percent said they planned to vote for a third-party candidate, though that support was “soft.”

“Young voters are down on everyone, and this translates directly to lost votes for Biden,” said the poll, which was conducted by Impact Research and published Tuesday.

That same poll pointed to a potential bright spot for Biden: his climate agenda. It said the Inflation Reduction Act was “in a good spot,” with two-thirds of those likely voters having heard of it. The poll found, however, that “there needs to be a clear connection made between” the IRA and Biden.

Still, some young voters see Biden as timid in the face of threats that will consign them to hotter temperatures, frequent flooding and more intense disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires that affect their health, communities and quality of life. Some groups, including the Sunrise Movement, have prodded Biden to grant himself broad powers to halt fossil fuel drilling and direct manufacturers to build renewable energy by declaring a “climate emergency.”

Biden has not gone down the road of invoking that authority, though a senior administration official alluded to the fact that the White House has nonetheless relied on policies undergirding it. The official noted that Biden leaned on the Defense Production Act, a wartime power used to direct manufacturing to meet national security needs, to spark solar and heat pump manufacturing in the U.S.

“We’ve taken on climate with a sense of urgency and the recognition of the stakes,” said the official, who was granted anonymity to discuss upcoming policy announcements, in a press call last week. “The president continues to direct his team to look at all tools, all authorities that will help us move forward on this objective, both of tackling the crisis and unlocking the economic opportunity that comes with it.”